


can't take the sky from me

by celeste9



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Family, Flying, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 09:24:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5922481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe is his mother's son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	can't take the sky from me

**Author's Note:**

> This was written to this prompt from icecream_junkie: _“She has been gone for so long that he has trouble remembering her face, but she is with him every time he flies.” Poe remembers his mum._ How could I resist?? *g* The title (I'm so sorry) is from Firefly.

Poe gently eased into a turn, arcing his X-wing to the left, bringing the ship back around towards the base. He didn’t often get the chance to just _fly_ anymore, no mission, no goal, just Poe and his ship and the open sky, but whenever he did, he felt like a little kid again, experiencing freedom and pure joy for the first time.

Whenever he did, he remembered his mother.

Poe’s mother had been gone so long that he had trouble remembering her face, her features not as clear in his mind as they used to be, but she was with him every time he flew. He thought of her when he executed maneuvers that should have been impossible, thinking of the old Rebellion pilots who told him Shara Bey had been one of the best they’d ever seen. He thought of her when he was in the darkest reaches of space, just Poe walled in between sheets of metal, and remembered General Organa telling him that Shara Bey had been the bravest, most daring woman she’d ever met. He thought of her when he soared down onto every new planet, thinking of the gift she had given him that very first moment she’d brought him up into the sky with her.

The other pilots teased him sometimes, saying that Poe didn’t love anyone half so much as he loved his T-70, and Poe always laughed and joked back. The truth was, flying had become something of a lifelong romance for Poe. He never felt as good as he did when he was up in a ship, his hands on the controls. His ship never let him down, not like a person could. As long as he took care of her, she’d be there, responding to his touch, an extension of himself. Truth be told, if Poe couldn’t be in the air, the next best thing was tinkering on his X-wing. Sometimes he thought he knew the insides of his fighter better than he knew himself.

And flying… well, flying was the best rush and the biggest comfort he’d ever experienced all rolled up into one.

When Poe was a boy, his mother had sometimes let him sit on her lap while she flew. He remembered being in awe at her control, at the ease with which she could bring a ship to life. He remembered watching her light handling on the console, thinking she was obviously the most amazing woman who had ever lived. He remembered whooping with joy when she went faster, when she when she went higher, when she turned tighter. She would let him put his hands on the stick, keeping her own hands on top of his, letting Poe feel as if he was the one in charge.

In retrospect, Poe knew that they hadn’t truly been going very high or very fast at all, and that his young mind likely would have exploded if he’d known exactly what his mother could have done with that ship. Those memories still were among Poe’s fondest.

As the years passed, his mother had flown less and less, her ship mostly consigned to the ground. Poe got bigger, and he learned to, if not satisfy, appease his yearning for flight through climbing. He would clamber up into the highest branches of the tallest trees he could, looking up and imagining he was a fighter pilot, shooting down TIEs. He had liked to survey the land, able to see far more than he ever could with his feet on the ground. His mother would stand far down below, her hands on her hips, sternly calling for him to come inside but with a smile tugging at her mouth. She would ruffle Poe’s hair and call him her little rebel, and absently touch her hand to her A-wing whenever she passed it.

Shara Bey had died when Poe was eight. On the day of her funeral, Poe had stood next to her A-wing and blinked back tears, thinking that she would never again sit in the pilot’s seat, that the ship would never again fly as it had flown before. The A-wing felt lifeless and dead without Poe’s mother, just an empty metal shell, its potential forever stolen, when before… Before it had been everything.

He’d slept inside the ship that night, curled up in a blanket his father had brought him after he refused to come back into the house. Though he had been bigger then than he had been before, when his mother had first taken him up above the trees, the cockpit seemed larger than it had, bereft of her presence. He dreamed of his mother, sharing the tiny cockpit with her, feeling warm and loved and safe and _free_ , but when he woke, she was still gone and the ship was still just a ship. Empty.

Poe had spent all the years since chasing that feeling.

Becoming a pilot had been less a choice and more a need; it had been Poe simply becoming himself. Flying made him feel like he was able to do _anything,_ the potential of the entire galaxy in front of him. Flying made him feel close to his mother in a way he hadn’t been able to be since he was eight years old. He hadn’t been held by his mother in more than twenty years, but when he flew, he felt her.

Poe knew what people said about him. He knew they said that if you had a crazy, impossible mission, just give it to Dameron. He knew they called him gutsy and bold and courageous. They said he was the most daring pilot in the Resistance, the best pilot in the galaxy.

None of these were things Poe would dispute. He knew he was a good pilot, and he was proud of that fact. It might have been true that Poe enjoyed the thrill of danger, craved it, even, that he’d never met an adventure he didn’t like, but he got scared sometimes, too. On the _Finalizer,_ after he’d given up BB-8 to Kylo Ren, he had honestly thought he was going to die, alone, a traitor to his own cause, possessing nothing more of use to anyone. He had been afraid.

But whenever Poe got scared, he thought of all the people Lieutenant Shara Bey had saved. He thought of her medal for conspicuous gallantry, and he thought of all the times she must have been terrified but kept going anyway. He thought of her hands covering his on the stick in the A-wing and imagined that she was always watching out for him, that she had never stopped guiding him. He remembered his father telling him how in the middle of the battle on Endor he’d looked up at the sky and thought of Poe’s mother way up in space, looking down at him.

_Your father and I couldn’t sit by and do nothing,_ Poe’s mother had told him all those years ago. _Couldn’t sit by and do nothing._ People said that Poe was brave, that he was a good man, but all he was doing was trying to be the man his mother would have wanted him to be, a man she could be proud of. She had loved him so much that she risked everything to make the galaxy he would grow up in a safer place. Not only for him, but for all the children who had yet to be born. He loved her enough to honor her memory.

He didn’t care what people said. He knew his own heart.

Poe knew that in the scheme of things, his life didn’t much matter. He was only one person, in a sea full of persons. All he wanted was to do what his parents had done, what his mother had done, and use his life to accomplish something worthwhile, so that their sacrifices would mean something. So it wouldn’t all have been for nothing, as his father feared. As Poe had flown through the Starkiller Base, he’d thought of his mother every time he unleashed an energy burst into the containment center. He’d done it for her.

He hoped she would have been proud.

BB-8 was chattering as they set down on the tarmac, back at base, communicating with the T-70 but mostly just babbling like a man talking to himself. Poe brought his ship down lightly, and turned off the engine. When he climbed out, he stood for a second outside the cockpit with the wind in his hair, just soaking in the surroundings, clinging to the last bit of blissful peace the flying had given him.

On solid ground again, Poe touched his hand to the nose of his X-wing, trailing his fingers along the metal. He closed his eyes and thought of looking up, watching his mother do the same to her A-wing, the act so familiar it was almost like a ritual. Her face sometimes blurred in Poe’s mind, but he remembered her smile, and her laugh, and the way she had looked standing there so tall. She had been beautiful, Poe was sure.

BB-8 chirped near Poe’s shins, and Poe opened his eyes.

“Nothing’s wrong, Beebee-Ate. I was just… remembering.”

Another concerned inquiry.

Poe smiled down at him. “Good memories,” he said, and let his hand fall back to his side.

The best.

**_End_ **


End file.
